As the variety of television programming and media content sources continues to increase, viewers may want to locate television media content and programming choices that may be of interest to them. In addition to scheduled television program broadcasts, television viewing options also include on-demand choices which enable a viewer to search for and request media content for viewing when convenient rather than at a scheduled broadcast time.
A viewer can initiate a search for a list of television programming choices in a program guide (also commonly referred to as an electronic program guide or “EPG”). A search is typically based on text-string matching, and an alphabetical list of programs and/or movies is filtered and returned in response to the search request. Another type of search for television programming choices is a field-based search, such as a search for “new movies” or “sports”. Text-string matching is a fairly limited form of searching, in that a viewer's results will be limited to a set of programs that happen to have the search string in a particular field, and therefore the search results are dependent on what the metadata creators add to the field descriptions. This leads to the viewer obtaining results that either do not have the desired program or bury the desired program in a long list of results because many programs have the same text-string. In addition, if a viewer misspells a search term, the search system can return unwanted results or even no results at all.
Unwanted, too many, or even no search results can lead to viewer dissatisfaction when wanting to locate television programming that may be of interest to the viewer. In addition, a search initiated via a program guide may be cumbersome for a viewer who enters the search term(s) with a remote control device. Further, a slowly delivered search response from a search system of a content provider can increase the frustration of repeated searching for the viewer.